Unemployment: Consequences, Caseworkers and Job Search

This project consists of three parts which together studies unemployment: its individual consequences and what public policies are effective in shortening unemployment durations.

Throughout the project, we use up-to-date empirical methods coupled with unique Swedish administrative micro-data to answer the posed research questions.The first part of the project analyses matching between caseworkers and job seekers and to what extent the importance of a caseworker varies with the characteristics of the job seeker or the similarity to her caseworker.

From these analysis, we compare different caseworker-job seeker allocations and ask the question if employment outcomes and welfare could increase by matching caseworkers to job seekers in an optimal fashion.The second part of the project studies job search behaviour and strategies.

Job seekers differ tremendously in ways they search for new jobs and which of these ways are “the best” is far from obvious and may even vary depending on the type of job seeker.

In this project we examine and evaluate various job search strategies in terms of future labor market outcomes such as re-employment, wages and employment duration. We also look at how the effect of various strategies varies with characteristics of the job seekers.

The third part of the project investigates how time in unemployment affects subsequent labor market outcomes such as earnings, employment, wages and match quality.

Moreover, we study the effect on family outcomes such as the probability of divorce, number of children and the unemployed partners’ labor supply.

Using variation in unemployment durations across similar groups of unemployed individuals the project brings new insights to questions of duration dependence and family formation.